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Sir John Lavery RA RSA RHA (1856-1941)
THE EARL OF LONSDALE K. G., 1931
oil on canvas
signed lower left; signed, titled and dated on reverse; with partial framer’s label also on reverse
26 x 16_in. (66.04 x 41.91cm)
Provenance: Christie’s, London, 6 March 1986, lot 51;Private collection
Exhibited:
‘Their Majesties’ Court, Buckingham Palace, 1931, Portrait Studies and Other Sketches by Sir John Lavery RA’, P&D
Colnaghi & Co, London, 1932, catalogue no. 65, as Study for the Portrait of the Earl of Lonsdale KG (illustrated in
catalogue)
‘‘To me he was the most paintable - not to say the best dressed - Englishman I knew’, Lavery wrote when he recalled
his sittings in 1930 with Hugh Cecil Lowther, Fifth Earl of Lonsdale (1857-1944). The previous year he had been
approached by the city of Doncaster for a large portrait of the ‘Yellow Earl’ in Garter Robes to hang in its Mansion House,
in commemoration of his beneficence to the city. Lonsdale had promoted its racecourse and recently performed
the Doncaster airport opening ceremony. Although Lavery included his flamboyant sitter’s yellow coach and liveried
flunkeys in the finished product, he was privately critical with the result (fig 1. Sir John Lavery, The Right Honourable Earl
of Lonsdale, KG, GCVO, 1931, Doncaster Mansion House). (1)
Of course the ‘State Portrait’ embodied a set of conventions stretching back to Tudor times. It was, as John Berger and
others have pointed out, more to do with the trappings of status and power than with individual personality. (2) These
immediately created tensions for the modern portrait painter who was already losing ground to photography. Although
he came from an age when such things remained possible - as his State Visit of Queen Victoria …1888 (Glasgow
Museums) testifies - Lavery, like the younger painters, William Orpen, William Nicholson and Augustus John, realized that
the purposes underwriting such conventions were gone. Catching the mind’s construction in the face was much more
important and even though some critics admired the ‘dazzlingly magnificent’ rendering of the celebrity sitter, others
inevitably regarded the extraneous inclusions of the Doncaster portrait as a mark of its failure. One even remarked that
St James’s Park with the Houses of Parliament in the background, was ‘perilously near to Hollywood’s notion of the
stately homes of England’. (3) Although Lavery might agree before sending the grand portrait to the Academy, there is
little doubt that he was impressed by Lowther’s radiant personality. His striking face, marked by years in the boxing ring,
transcended all.
The second son of the third Earl, he was not expected to inherit the title and as a youth had to be rescued from unwise
entanglements by his family - he ran away from Eton to join the circus, and then sold his inheritance to invest in a
cattle ranch in Wyoming which failed. (4) At twenty-one he married the daughter of the Marquis of Huntly against her
parents’ wishes, and disgraced himself by having an affair with an actress ten years later - necessitating a long penitential
expedition through the frozen wastes of Canada. (5) Thereafter he settled down to enjoy himself in sporting activities,
becoming first President of the National Sporting Club, inaugurating the Lonsdale Belt in 1909, becoming a Senior
Steward at the Jockey Club, and later, chairing both the Automobile Association and Arsenal Football Club. He was also a
keen yachtsman, racing Kaiser Wilhelm II at Cowes in the 1890s and defeating him in seventeen of the twenty-two races
they contested. The two, nevertheless were firm friends up to the Great War, Lowther hosting Wilhelm at Lowther Castle,
his country seat in Cumberland, in 1907.(6)
‘To me he nher
IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART · 28 SEPTEMBER 2015